Sunday, July 13, 2014

Terror in Iraq

Having faded from the conscience of
most Americans as our war of aggression there became history rather than the
stuff of elections and everyday life, Iraq is now back in the news as
proponents of a new caliphate, the central government, Kurdish nationalists,
and a host of other interests battle to maintain or dismantle the colonial-era
creation.

But there have been other reminders
of our presence there in the news.In
the early 2000s, the U.S. invasion infamously opened the door to an Al Qaeda
presence in the country—the very thing our lying Vice-President claimed we were
going there to combat.The result was a
battle between the rival ideologies of fundamentalist Christians and
fundamentalist Muslims.

But we introduced another kind of
terror into Iraq when we invaded in violation of international law and in contravention
of our own public interest.We razed
cities, we destroyed infrastructure, and we killed tens and then hundreds of
thousands of people.We also introduced
mercenaries, most memorably in the form of Blackwater, to do some of the
dirtier work.

Founded by religious
fundamentalists, Blackwater came to comprise a kind of private army operating
in Iraq.It became quickly clear that
the mercenaries’ activities in Iraq were not always in keeping with the goals
of the occupying U.S. force and the emerging Iraqi governments.Things came to a head when the mercenaries
massacred a large number of Iraqi civilians in 2007.

It
was reported late last month that shortly before the massacre, the State
Department had launched an investigation into Blackwater’s activities in
Iraq.The chief investigators were
ordered out of the country by the U.S. Embassy, but not before a top Blackwater
operative threatened to kill the chief investigator, adding that he would face
no consequences because the death would occur in a lawless war zone.

Its investigation cut short, the
State Department team nonetheless concluded that Blackwater was operating with
“lax oversight” in “an environment full of liability and negligence”.According
to the New York Times, the
investigators wrote that “the management structures in place to manage and
monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors
themselves…Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law…the
contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in
control”.

The New York Times story provides further details of the culture and
practice of the mercenary army, also noting that the death threat against the
investigator was taken “seriously”, and was particularly disturbing because
“organizations take on the attitudes and mannerisms of their leader”.

When the threats were reported, the
U.S. Embassy, home to the successive viceroys handpicked by the neoconservative
administration in D.C., shut down the investigation, effectively allowing
mercenaries to dictate government policy and intimidate government
investigators.

Thus a new kind of terror was
introduced into Iraq, as hired guns, subject to neither Iraqi law, nor, it
seemed then, to U.S. law, roamed the street killing at will.It was terror in the sense that mercenaries
were used to introduce arbitrary violence onto the streets of Iraq.And it was terror in the sense that it marked
the ascendancy of raw, lawless, violent profiteering over rational civilian
rule, a move characteristic of the degeneration of republics into empires.

The power of Blackwater and its
successor organisations in U.S. politics and in the Gulf represents a loss of
control by the public over the conduct of our country’s international affairs,
a loss which mirrors the ability of plutocrats in other spheres to wrest
control of economic policy away from the public to be harnessed in the service
of those who would profit spectacularly from the economic misfortunes of
others, just as organisations like Blackwater profit from war, chaos, and
death.

Some will see the triumph of such
ideology and practice as an accidental phenomenon, the product of mismanagement
and inefficiency in our immoral and ill-considered war of aggression in
Iraq.But in reality, the use of
indiscriminate violence, the ascendancy of profiteering, and the breakdown of
civil law are all part and parcel of imperial war-making.

Unless the United States puts a
halt to its colonial-style engagement with the wider world and moves away from
policies driven by “national security” rather than “public interest”, we will
only sink deeper into such a corrosive imperial state.

2 comments:

Excellent Article, Excellent Points. If only our gov't would take your advice and remove our combat troops like they did in Iraqi at the end of 2011, or they are currently doing in Afghanistan.... Actually you did kind of focus on the one place we have gotten out of militarily....

The piece doesn't have anything to do with removing our combat troops from any of these places. It has more to do with the links between their original introduction, current problems, and the violence inherent in our foreign policy.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.